Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  Sosabowski’s force had been created to fight for the liberation of its country, and the fact that it was to be sent on this slapdash mission while the Home Army was still engaged in its doomed battle for Warsaw made the Polish general particularly irate. But his objections found no favor with British staff officers, who were known for ridiculing his heavy accent and “giggling like schoolboys” when he expressed his views. As Prince Bernhard noted, the British military “doesn’t like being told by a bloody foreigner that they’re wrong.” Or, as it turned out, by anyone else.

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  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, was a beautiful day in Arnhem, with sunshine bathing the prosperous, peaceful little resort town and gilding the nearby Rhine. Many residents took a stroll that afternoon, intent on enjoying one of the last warm days of the waning summer. Known for its gracious hotels and well-kept houses and gardens, Arnhem had never looked lovelier, one resident thought. Then came the roar of approaching planes and the jaw-dropping sight of thousands of men dropping from the sky. For Arnhem and its people, nothing would ever be the same again.

  Shan Hackett and his men were among the parachutists drifting down into that bucolic setting, which, as he feared, would soon become an inferno. Shortly before taking off from Britain, Hackett had told his staff and battalion commanders to forget all the optimistic talk bandied about by Market Garden’s top commanders. Given the “German capability for a swift and violent response to any threat that really mattered,” he said, his men should brace “for the hardest fighting and worst casualties” imaginable. His pessimism, already strong, had deepened when he learned that, instead of being dispatched to Arnhem at one time, the paratroopers were to be sent in waves over several days because of a shortage of cargo planes and gliders. Making matters worse, his own division was to be dropped several miles from the Arnhem bridge, its chief objective.

  All of Hackett’s dire predictions, along with those of Sosabowski and the Dutch, came true. The German panzer divisions were indeed dug in at Arnhem, and they quickly responded. Although the paratroopers would have suffered many losses by landing on or close to the Arnhem bridge, they would have seemed small compared to the number of casualties they actually took. Almost nothing worked according to plan. Within twelve hours of their arrival, the British had forfeited any chance of capturing the bridge. The only battle they faced now was the struggle to survive.

  The advance of the British and U.S. ground forces, meanwhile, was extraordinarily slow. As predicted, heavy tanks and trucks bogged down in the Netherlands’ soggy soil, and the only road on which the forces could travel was soon blocked by disabled vehicles. Allied infantry came under heavy fire from Germans on either side of the road, many of them Fifteenth Army soldiers who two weeks earlier had escaped from Belgium through the gap left by the British at the Antwerp estuary.

  Another failure of this “epic cock-up,” as one British officer described the operation, was the monumental breakdown of the British radio communication system, particularly that of the 1st Airborne, just as the battle began. Transmitters were lost or ceased to work, and, with no one knowing where anyone else was, there was no way to coordinate a systematic attack. Actually, although the British never took advantage of it, they did have a communications alternative: the Dutch phone system was working, and the resistance suggested its use to British commanders. But because of their suspicions of the Dutch, the British dismissed that suggestion. They also turned down offers by the resistance to act as guides and to provide information about the composition and location of German forces. “We were prepared to do anything, even sacrifice our lives if necessary,” one resistance fighter later said. “Instead, we felt useless and unwanted. It was now increasingly clear that the British neither trusted us nor intended to use us.”

  In the view of Cornelius Ryan, who wrote A Bridge Too Far, the magisterial history of Market Garden, the British “had an outstanding force at their disposal whose contributions, had they been accepted, might well have altered the grim situation of the British 1st Airborne Division.” The few Britons who did accept help from the Dutch, such as Major Derek Cooper of the Guards Armoured Division, were abundantly rewarded. Ordered to get through to the headquarters of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division at the Nijmegen bridge, Cooper was guided there by resistance members, who, he said, were “absolutely invaluable.”

  In Arnhem itself, where the fighting was fiercest, dozens of Dutch civilians braved withering gunfire to retrieve dead British soldiers and carry the wounded to makeshift casualty stations in nearby houses and hotels. At one point, Arnhem resident Kate ter Horst—a “figure of truly heroic proportions,” in the words of Shan Hackett—sheltered more than two hundred injured British paratroopers in her home. Other residents hid British officers in their houses and sheds to prevent their capture.

  The fighting in Arnhem was savage and bloody, and the town, bombarded by German artillery fire, became a charnel house. Many if not most buildings were burned to the ground, and the bodies of soldiers and civilians were scattered everywhere. “Arnhem, one of the most scenic spots in the Netherlands,” was now a “miniature Stalingrad,” Ryan wrote.

  On September 25, eight days after Market Garden began, most of the tattered remnants of the 1st Airborne were evacuated under cover of darkness, while many of the wounded surrendered to the Germans. Once they had secured their victory, the Germans treated their British prisoners with great consideration; one British officer called his captors “kind, chivalrous, even comforting.” But they showed no such compassion to Dutch civilians, executing anyone they found who had aided the British. “It was pretty dismaying,” a British captain said, “that while the Germans were giving us food, water, and cigarettes, on the other side of the square they were shooting out of hand Dutchmen whom they believed had helped us.”

  Overall, the number of Allied casualties from Market Garden totaled more than 17,000. Of the 10,000-man force at Arnhem, fewer than 3,000 escaped death, injury, or capture. Civilian casualties were estimated to be as high as 5,000. Amid the smoking ruins of the town, its surviving residents took refuge in cellars and other ad hoc shelters, struggling to live without gas, electricity, or water, and with very little food. A few days after the British surrender, the Germans ordered all Dutch civilians to leave Arnhem and nearby villages.

  Audrey Hepburn in 1942.

  Audrey Hepburn, who lived three miles outside Arnhem, watched the evacuation in horror. “I still feel sick when I remember the scenes,” she said years later. “It was human misery at its starkest—masses of refugees on the move, some carrying their dead, babies born on the roadside, hundreds collapsing with hunger.” The residents of Arnhem were not allowed back until the Allies finally liberated the area in April 1945.

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  IN ALL THE CHAOS and carnage of Arnhem, several hundred wounded British paratroopers managed to dodge death and evade capture. They were whisked away from hospitals, casualty stations, and battlefields by resistance members, who hid them in villages and towns several miles away. Audrey Hepburn’s mother provided food for several, and Audrey herself delivered messages from the resistance to men in hiding.

  One of those rescued was Shan Hackett, who, with his troops, had taken part in the brutal hand-to-hand combat in Arnhem. At the end, he was one of the few surviving members of his 1,000-man brigade, which, in his words, had been “the heart and center of my life” for two years. In less than a week, it had been virtually wiped out.

  Hackett, who had been hit in the abdomen and leg by shrapnel from a mortar shell, was so gravely wounded that a German doctor who examined him said that nothing could be done and he should be allowed to die in peace. A South African surgeon from the 1st Airborne, who had also been taken prisoner, thought otherwise; he operated on the general and saved his life.

  A few weeks later, when the German high command ordered the British wounded to be sent to prisoner-of-war camps, several members of the resistance smuggled Hackett out of a hospital near Arnhem. Weak,
ashen-faced, and still in severe pain, he was taken to a tidy white house with a gable roof near the center of Ede, a bustling market town about twelve miles away. There he was put to bed in a tiny upstairs room with lace curtains, a white counterpane on the bed, and a needlepoint sampler of Sleeping Beauty on the wall.

  His nurses and protectors were three middle-aged, unmarried sisters—Ann, Mien, and Cor de Nooij—who had never been involved in resistance activities before. But when asked by members of the underground to hide a wounded British officer, they had immediately agreed. “Thank God I now have something worthwhile to do!” one of them had exclaimed.

  When Hackett, several days into his convalescence, looked out a window for the first time, he realized the extraordinary risk the sisters were taking in hiding him. On the street below, dozens of German officers and soldiers were “passing to and fro within speaking distance of me.” Ede, which was less than three miles from the Rhine, had a sizable German presence: in addition to a large contingent of troops stationed there, it served as a rest center for soldiers on leave from the front. Indeed, many of the houses surrounding the de Nooij home had been requisitioned as German billets; the backyard adjoining the sisters’ garden belonged to a house filled with German military police.

  Yet hiding a British general under the noses of the enemy never seemed to faze the sisters or, for that matter, any of the members of their extended family who came to visit Hackett. He became particularly close to Johan Snoek, a son of one of the sisters and an ardent member of the resistance, and Johan’s sister, Marie.

  As the days and weeks passed, this hard-charging, hot-tempered brigadier, accustomed to giving orders and having his way, found himself enjoying the quiet, small comforts and rhythm of daily life in a household that “was now becoming my whole world.” Once he was well enough to get out of bed, he would come down in the evening to the parlor, where the sisters, whom he now called “Aunt Ann,” “Aunt Cor,” and “Aunt Mien,” gathered with other family members. While the “aunts” sewed and darned, Hackett played chess with Johan, read Shakespeare from an English-language version that Aunt Ann had found for him, or worked on his daily Dutch lesson with Marie. He was given his own mug for drinking tea and was gently teased for liking milk in it—the de Nooijs called it “kinderthee.” At nine o’clock most nights, someone would take out a radio from its hiding place behind a cupboard and they would listen to Radio Orange on the BBC. Before they all said good night, a member of the family would read several chapters from the Bible. Those evenings, Hackett recalled, were suffused with “peace and industry and contentment….It never occurred to me to give much thought to the strange and dangerous circumstances in which it was all happening. This was now my life; it had become for me the norm.”

  On November 5, Hackett celebrated his thirty-fourth birthday with the de Nooijs. “It would be a terrible thing,” Marie told him, “for anyone to spend his birthday among strange people, far from home, and nothing be done about it all.” Awakened at six on the morning of his birthday, he was told to leave his bedroom door open so that he could hear what was going on downstairs. In the parlor below, the family gathered around a small organ and sang, in English, all the verses of “God Save the King.” They had wanted to celebrate in the evening, Aunt Ann told him, but that was when the Germans were out in force on the streets, and “it would not have been wise to arouse their curiosity with the British national anthem.” A few hours later, all the de Nooijs came to his room, bearing coffee and a huge apple cake made from prewar flour that the aunts had been saving for a special occasion. Atop the cake was a small painted Union Jack that bore the words “Right or wrong, my country.”

  After the impromptu party was over and the family had left, Hackett broke down and cried. “Such loving kindness to a stranger in adversity, on whose behalf these people had already accepted so many dangers with such modesty and courage, was a thing beyond words then—and never to be forgotten afterwards,” he later wrote. That evening he went downstairs to spend a couple of hours with those he now regarded as “my family.”

  For the four months he stayed with the de Nooij sisters, Hackett never stopped marveling at the willingness of these otherwise quiet, gentle women to defy the Germans. Early in his recuperation, he had trouble sleeping, which was made worse by the barking of a large Alsatian dog roaming around the backyard of the German military police office. When he mentioned the problem to Aunt Ann, she marched over to the house and confronted the head of the police detachment. “Someone in my house around the corner is very sick,” she said. “This person cannot sleep because of that dog of yours and the awful noise it makes all night. Will you please have the goodness to see that at night it is kept locked up?” The startled German nodded, and the barking stopped.

  As part of Hackett’s recovery, one or another of the sisters would take him for walks in the early evening to build up his strength and stamina. These strolls past “the tidy gardens and prim, dignified little houses of the older part of town” were the highlight of his day, he recalled. Yet though he enjoyed the sight of “the steep gables, the snow on the ground, the gentle mist of winter twilight,” he constantly worried about being stopped by one of the many Germans who brushed past him and whichever sister was accompanying him that night.

  The women, however, never seemed to notice or care. Aunt Ann, in fact, seemed to go out of her way to court danger. During one evening stroll, she and Hackett walked to the post office in Ede so she could mail letters warning other town residents of the dangers of collaborating with the Germans. More than a dozen German soldiers were lounging in front of the building, smoking and talking. Hackett nearly fainted when Aunt Ann, her arm linked with his, pushed her way through the soldiers and deposited the letters in the mailbox outside. After apologizing to the Germans for disturbing them, she and Hackett continued their walk. Years afterward, he still had difficulty understanding how “this mild and unassuming woman” could be bold enough to “move straight into the eye of danger with someone at her side whose presence was her death warrant if he were discovered—even using him to help carry letters almost as lethal to her if she were found out.”

  Buoyed by the sisters’ example, Hackett decided to join the resistance himself. He and Johan started their own underground newspaper, a single-sheet mimeographed weekly that they called Pro Patria. Boasting a circulation of two hundred, it focused on the news of the war and the situation in the Netherlands. Hackett, who was the paper’s military correspondent, wrote a column under the headline “Notes on the War in the West.” Pro Patria was published for nearly a month, until the Gestapo in the area began to take an interest in it and Hackett and Johan had to shut it down.

  As cozy and sheltered as Hackett’s life was with the de Nooij family, the harsh realities of war increasingly intruded. In the early days of the war, the family had laid in a store of food as a hedge against shortages, but those reserves were almost gone. They continually pressed on Hackett small luxuries—an occasional egg, a spoonful of jam—that they didn’t allow themselves. He protested, but with no success. “When these ladies had once made up their minds about something, there was little more to be said,” he noted.

  When Hackett asked the sisters where they got the rations to feed him, they explained that the Dutch resistance, as part of their program to protect underdivers, had provided ration cards, either forged or stolen, for him. But by late 1944, there was no longer enough food to meet the monthly ration, and Hackett, like the Dutch, was never without a nagging feeling of hunger. Although the food shops were virtually empty, people stood in long lines to get whatever they could. In downtown Ede, central kitchens were organized to provide town residents with a daily half liter of cabbage and potato stew per person. “One or another of our household stood in that queue with a pot every day,” Hackett said. “After a time, that, too, stopped.” Even when they did get a bit of food, there was no gas to cook with. Coal also had disappeared. In the frigid winter of 1944–45, the only heat
in the de Nooij house came from a wood-burning stove in the parlor, fed by several cords of wood that Hackett himself had chopped. To wash in the morning, he had to break a thin layer of ice in the water pitcher in his room.

  In the months after Arnhem, the Germans’ crackdown on the Dutch showed itself in other ways. German police and soldiers made more frequent visits to the houses in Ede, snatching up food, woolen goods, furniture, china, glassware, bicycles, skates, and anything else that struck their fancy. Farmers outside the town lost their cattle and workshops their machinery. When the Germans came calling on the de Nooij sisters, however, they repeatedly met with failure. On one occasion, Aunt Cor feigned a fit of hysterics. Hearing shrieks downstairs, Hackett looked outside his bedroom window to see two German soldiers “almost slinking away from the door. A cloud of defeat brooded over their heads.”

  But the sisters couldn’t expect to get away with such theatrics forever. Even more worrisome, the Germans were stepping up their searches for underdivers in the area. Although the de Nooij house had not yet been a razzia target, a hiding place, fitted with a trap door, was constructed under the top-floor landing, and the sisters and Hackett conducted daily drills to get him hidden as quickly as possible in case of a search. Knowing that his presence was putting in mortal danger these people he had come to love, Hackett was haunted by the fear of what would happen to them and other Ede residents if he were captured: “the searches, the reprisals, the taking of hostages, and the summary punishments, all too dreadful to think of.”

  In January, “Bill” Wildeboer, the leader of the resistance in Ede, came to the house to tell Hackett that rumors had reached the Germans of a British paratroop general on the run somewhere near Arnhem. But Wildeboer also brought with him the possibility of escape: he mentioned that dozens of other Arnhem survivors, hidden in nearby villages and farms, had already been spirited away to freedom. It was time for Hackett, now almost fully recovered from his wounds, to follow their example.